Examination of Witnesses (Questions 55-82)
MYLES WICKSTEAD AND ANDREW SHEPHERD
26 OCTOBER 2010
Q55 Chair:
May I say good morning to both of you? For the record, could
you could introduce yourselves.
Myles Wickstead:
I am a visiting professor at the Open University. I was head
of the secretariat of the Commission for Africa and I spent my
career doing both development and diplomacy in DFID and the Foreign
Office.
Andrew Shepherd:
I am a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute across
the water. I am the Director of the Chronic Poverty Research
Centre, and that is the capacity in which I am here today. I
was previously director of programmes for the rural part of ODI.
Q56 Chair:
You both were at or around the MDG summit physically?
Andrew Shepherd:
That's right.
Myles Wickstead:
Yes.
Q57 Chair:
We had the Secretary of State in front of us last week—normally,
we do these things the other way round. I don't know whether
you've seen the transcript or heard what he said, but are there
any particular comments? Obviously, we will ask you questions
about some of the things he said anyway, but do you have any particular
comments or observations on what he said to us? Neither of you
were there.
Myles Wickstead:
No, I watched it on YouTube and I very much agreed with what he
said, the presentation he gave and the interpretation he gave
us.
Andrew Shepherd:
Yes, I was impressed by how confident he was and how many good
stories he had. I probably have a slightly different take on the
MDG process and summit, but I guess we'll come to that.
Q58 Chair:
We will indeed. Just to pick up on that, I think it's fair to
say that the Secretary of State is very enthusiastic about the
job he's doing. His whole approach to the MDG summit was that
this was an opportunity to get everything back on track. As he
put it, it was a path for renewed momentum in the global fight
against poverty. There was obviously some hesitation about looking
beyond 2015 as if that was a cop out and he wanted to see if we
could use the next five years to try and deliver what we set out
to do in 2000. To what extent do you agree with what he says?
Was it a significant event that gives us a renewed attack on
trying to deliver them over the next five years?
Myles Wickstead:
Yes, I was a little worried about what was going to happen in
New York about a year ago. It seemed to me that all the enthusiasm
and some of the momentum had gone out of the process. I felt
it was important to try and reignite that momentum, and I think
that did begin to happen from around the first quarter of this
current year. One of the reasons we decided to reconvene the
Commission for Africa was to try and inject some momentum into
the process. I had a strong feeling from the events in New York
that that had indeed happened. There was a lot of energy around,
a lot of events happening, and I think some proper and serious
commitments.
Andrew Shepherd:
Yes, I didn't have the access that Myles had to the main events
of the MDG summit. I was a little bit around the edges, as it
were. I was there to present the report on poverty that the Chronic
Poverty Research Centre produced a couple of years ago and an
update on that report. The event at which I presented that also
saw two other reports on poverty presented, from the UN Research
Institute for Social Development and the UN Department of Economic
and Social Affairs, so it represented quite a substantial amount
of work on poverty and progress in reducing poverty.
There was, I would say, quite a consensus between
the three reports on a number of issues. One point is that we
do not have the diagnosis and the policies absolutely right yet;
that includes the diagnosis and the policies for achieving the
MDGs, even the targets, by 2015, let alone the goals. Secondly,
taking what you might call a developmental approach, as opposed
to a target-driven approach, seemed to be what underlies the successes
in achieving the MDGs, at least in many cases. Thirdly, what
happens at national level—and this was reflected in your
discussion with the Secretary of State the other day—is
probably much more significant than what happens at international
level: aid can help, but it's really only a very small part of
the story in many cases. I think there was broad agreement on
those three issues.
My perception of the summit, the process leading
up to it, and the outcome document, is that a lot of those things
are recognised, particularly if you look at the outcome document,
which is very comprehensive—a massive long list of good
things that ought to be done--but they haven't quite got to what
the fundamental issues underlying making progress towards the
MDGs are and perhaps we can spend a bit of time talking about
some of those.
Q59 Chair:
That's relevant to our next question because the Secretary of
State has very much focused on having measurable outcomes and
measurable targets. He's talked about results-based policy.
He has talked about the donor countries and the recipient countries,
the developing countries, setting targets and he mentioned one
or two. He also mentioned an initiative between DFID and USAID
to try and identify what specifically they might be. How realistic
do you think it is that that can be done? It's interesting, Mr
Shepherd, that you're saying national ownership is perhaps more
important, but certain countries are falling off the edge and
not committing, and there is quite a vigorous campaign in the
UK to say, "Why on earth are we doing this?" against
the backdrop of our own financial difficulties. How successful
would they be in identifying those targets? More to the point,
will they be deliverable? Indeed, is that a way to demonstrate
to the people who are sceptical about the justification for aid
that it can be shown to work?
Myles Wickstead:
I think what's important about the MDGs is that they are measurable
and quantifiable, the ones that we currently have: they're about
numbers, they're about proportions, they're about percentages
coming out of poverty etc. We can measure progress against those.
What is more difficult to measure, perhaps, is what has created
the conditions under which those things can happen because, of
course, it's not just primary education inputs or basic health
inputs that lead to those outputs. There is a whole complicated
story, which everyone on the Committee is familiar with, around
governance, peace and security, economic growth, and all those
sorts of issues.
I think perhaps, if we do revisit these things, as
we must do, without getting in the way of the momentum behind
achieving the goals by 2015, we perhaps need to look at qualitative
issues a little more as well. For example, it's easy to measure
how many children—actually, it's not that easy to measure,
because statistics are notoriously unreliable in many developing
countries, including across Africa. When you're saying that there
has been this progress between 2000 and 2010, and you only have
statistics that go up to 2005, you have a problem. We can at
least make a pretty good guess about Ethiopia having moved from
two children in five going to primary school in 2000 to four children
in five going to school in 2010. That's a real step forward.
What we don't know so much about is how many of them have desks
to sit at, how many have books to go, and what they're learning
at the end of the process. I think there is a challenge there
about how we measure the outcomes rather than the inputs.
I think the second thing that we really need to focus
a little more on in any subsequent MDGs, or whatever, is sustainability.
Here we are with a very clear set of targets up to 2015; we may
come up with another set of targets that take us another 10 years
on or whatever, but what we're really interested in is what the
planet is going to look like in 50 or 100 years, and what sort
of planet our great-great-grandchildren are going to live on.
It's the sustainability—and I don't just mean climate change
and the issues around that—but what sort of economic growth
is it that improves the quality of life and not just the quantity
of life.
May I just make one final point before I pass on
to Andrew? It is the issue that you touched on Chair about whether
attention on a new set of goals, a new set of outcomes, might
distract attention from reaching 2015. The truth is that the key
overarching target for 2015 is to halve the proportion—and
this is an important point—of people living in absolute
poverty by 2015. We still have the other half to worry about.
This is not talking about going for the whole 100% and then not
making the target, perhaps; we still have that other 50%.
Q60 Chair:
And it's 50% of a rising population.
Myles Wickstead:
Absolutely, so even if we're completely successful about getting
to 2015 and achieving all the goals, we still have a lot of work
to do. We still need something like the MDGs to follow on.
Andrew Shepherd:
Yes, I think the goals are fine; they're wonderful. They're very
basic, however, so as Myles has just said, there is a lot more
to do, but they're fine. Obviously, governments set priorities
and targets and it is to be hoped that populations hold governments
to account; that process is absolutely fine and capable of delivering
results. I suppose my disappointment around the MDG process--I'm
thinking now of the next five years as well as the longer term--was
that we do know certain things and we've known them for some time,
but we haven't yet adapted the MDG framework towards them.
I'll just give one example and concentrate on one
policy area where there is something very concrete that can be
done. It's within reach, but the MDG discussion didn't quite
move in that direction and there was, I think, a general reluctance,
to take on new issues at this point. One of the things that we
know is that, although people progress out of poverty, they're
often very vulnerable in making that progression; they can be
easily set back by all sorts of hazards. Poor people face a much
greater number and intensity of risks than we do. They're very
ill-protected in facing those risks; many of the old systems that
used to work, the family clan-based systems and so on, no longer
work in the same way that they used to. You can have a country
that is making reasonably good progress and a number of people
in that country may also be making progress, but it's going to
be very hesitant and they can keep getting set back.
With relatively modest amounts of public expenditure
and even a relatively modest amount of political will, we know
that it is possible to put in place social protection measures
to protect people against those setbacks as they are desperately
struggling to climb out of poverty. There is lots of evidence
for this. I can leave you with a report and we have lots of other
researchbased evidence indicating that fairly simple, straightforward
cash transfers, pensions, public works programmes and other similar
sorts of schemes can produce a whole variety of benefits, but,
in particular, can protect people against that process of being
pushed back.
If you look at the percentages, you might have, in
any given period, let's say 10 people moving out of poverty.
Of those 10, perhaps five of them will not actually be able to
get out of poverty because they're getting set back along the
way. In one country, it might be eight people out of those 10
set back; in another country, it might be two people out of those
10 that are set back. That process is very well known, there
is a lot of evidence around it, and there are fairly straightforward
policies that can be introduced. We know that they work, there
is plenty of evidence about that, and they're not going to cost
the earth. All of what I've just mentioned is well recognised
by many of the UN agencies and in the outcome document, but there
is no plan of action going forward. It's completely left to countries.
There isn't a strong international thrust in that direction.
That's the one concrete thing I would pick out that would make
a huge difference; not just to people escaping poverty, but to
children attending school. Why are children withdrawn from school?
The enrolment rates have gone up fantastically—so a big
round of applause, on that score, for many, many countries—but
children, girls in particular, still drop out far too soon. Cash
transfers, either conditionally or unconditionally linked to children
going to school, can make a fantastic difference.
Q61 Chair:
Our focus is obviously on how the United Kingdom can engage in
the international arena. I'm going to bring in Anas Sarwar.
Andrew Shepherd:
Yes.
Q62 Anas Sarwar:
That's point I was going to raise. What was the UK's actual role
at the summit and how much of an active role did our own representatives
play? What do you think the UK's contribution was at the summit,
for example, in terms of leadership and securing outcomes by focusing
on offtrack MDGs? One of the things that we're all really
proud of is that the UK always seems to be one of the leading
forces for international development, and I just wondered whether
that was still the case at this summit.
Andrew Shepherd:
I think it's very much still the case, from my perception. I
think the UK was very heavily involved in the initiative on maternal
and child health, which was the one big financial initiative to
come out of the summit. Behind that, the UK has also been focusing
very strongly on gender equality issues, over a very long period
of time, and has been a fantastic leader on that. If I can just
go back to what I was just saying about social protection, it's
the UK that has led internationally in pushing the social protection
agenda, so I think the UK occupies a fantastic leadership position.
I think it's wonderful that we have, more or less, a consensus
across the political parties on international development and
clearly you, as a Committee, have a very important role in that.
Q63 Anas Sarwar:
What about in terms of the dynamics with countries that perhaps
aren't fulfilling their obligations as promised? Did you get
the sense that the UK was putting in a little bit extra to make
sure these countries are trying to forge relationships and trying
to encourage them to come forward?
Myles Wickstead:
Perhaps I can come in and just make a couple of points. I was
at two events where I was struck by this leadership role; one,
of course, was the event chaired by the Secretary General around
mother and child health, where the Deputy Prime Minister spoke
very strongly, very firmly, about the UK's political commitment.
This is, at the end of the day, about political will and leadership
and I think that came across very strongly, and people from other
countries—the G8 and elsewhere—I was talking to informally
afterwards were very impressed about the strong political consensus
around this agenda in the UK.
The other event that I was at was the private sector
forum, and Richard Branson spoke strongly at that. Michael
Hastings, in the other House, chaired part of that event. This
is not just about Government leadership, but also about the role
of the private sector and the potential for that to help on this
agenda, because, after all, the MDGs, if you look at them, don't
say how to achieve them. They don't say governments have to do
this; they talk, in MDG 8, about this consensus and, importantly,
that includes the private sector. In building that consensus
and creating this sense within the UK that the Government is taking
this leadership role, with the support of the other political
parties, with the support of the private sector, with the support
of this very vibrant NGO and the community that we have. I think
this gives us a fantastic nexus of influence so that we can influence
this agenda over the coming years.
Q64 Anas Sarwar:
Mr Wickstead, you said in a recent article that all roads lead
to the MDGs. Do you still feel, post the summit, that the MDGs
are the beall and endall in terms of our development
project, or do you feel that we are already starting to think
post2015? If we aren't thinking post2015, do you
think we should start thinking post2015?
Myles Wickstead:
I do think we should start thinking post-2015, of course we do
because, as I said earlier, even if we completely achieve the
MDGs, we will still be stuck with nearly a billion people in the
world who don't have enough to eat who are still stuck in poverty
who need that. We still need to think about the post-2015 paradigm.
What I was getting at is that the MDGs, although they appear
rather simplistic and easy, are enormously complex and difficult.
You do need good governance; you do need peace and security; you
do need strong economic growth; you do need—this perhaps
something that others might want to address and we might want
to come on to—sensible international trade rules. If developing
countries in Africa and elsewhere do build up the standards of
their products or their agricultural industry, they can then export
the results. What I'm getting at is that, if we did everything
we need to do to get to the MDGs, we would be doing the right
thing.
Q65 Anas Sarwar:
Just on that point, you summed up perfectly: there's a lot more
than just committing the money in making the MDGs successful.
Did you get a sense that the summit was focused primarily on
trying to get people to match their commitment in terms of a financial
commitment? Was there real discussion in terms of trying to improve
governance, institutions, tax systems and things in countries
that are going to lead to real and longterm development
that are not going to lead to a dependency culture?
Myles Wickstead:
I'm sure a lot of those discussions happened around the edges
of the summit; because summits are not just about what happens
in the formal parts, but around the edges. I'm sure there would've
been a lot of that discussion. The summit itself was about giving
this a high profile and generating political will. The hard work,
in a sense, comes afterwards. What is it you need to do to get
that? You've hit on one point that I think is really important:
building tax systems. All the indications are that for every dollar
you invest in building a tax system, you get $10 out. What is
not to like about that? It's kind of obvious.
Q66 Richard Harrington: If
we could just go back to maternal and child health campaign, which
obviously, from what we read, was the focal point or one of the
great breakthroughs in Nick Clegg's speech. We made our own commitments,
as some of the other countries did. To what extent do you feel
that this campaign represents a breakthrough in reaching the millennium
goals or is it something, but not something as special as it sounds?
Myles Wickstead:
I think it was special because what has been very evident is that
we've made good progress against a number of these goals, but
there's a risk of missing out around these important ones of maternal
and child health. They're the ones that are furthest behind in
terms of achievement. It was important to get that very strong
political push in order to regenerate interest specifically in
those, to show how far we were behind and to get some political
momentum behind the need to make progress towards them. I think
we all recognise that, if you work on these issues—on maternal
health, on women's health—then that has a huge impact across
the board on economic activity. It's not just a charitable thing;
it's also economically the sensible thing to do.
What is difficult sometimes about these vertical
silos of things is that it's quite difficult to know, for example,
when we say that all these new commitments have been made, what
is new and what is not new in that. I think there was a sense
that people had put more resources, more money, more input into
this, but quite how you measure what is new about that is a more
difficult thing to do.
Q67 Richard Harrington:
That leads me on to this. Obviously the classic example, the one
we're most interested in is DFID, but if you take all the programmes
that DFID has, how feasible is it for them to change the programmes
or reorient them towards the maternal and child health campaign,
so women's and children's issues have top priority, particularly
the reproductive health side of it? Can programmes be changed
so that that becomes central or is that taking things away from
the general population in those countries?
Myles Wickstead:
DFID has always had quite a strong focus on these issues anyway.
The great advantage of a programme that's expanding is that you
don't quite have to make those difficult choices that you have
to make when you have a programme that's static or declining.
It is possible therefore to do new things; to put additional
resources into areas that you think are particularly important
to focus on, without having to do less in other areas. For example,
you know as well as me, the Secretary of State has said that 30%
of the programme in future will go on supporting work in fragile
states etc, but you can do that without necessarily having to
withdraw resources from other areas on which DFID is already focusing.
Q68 Richard Harrington:
Sorry to harp on about this, but there are a lot of countries
in which gender equality, to use the trendy phrase, is not only
not a priority for the governments of those countries but in many
ways culturally, or possibly religiously, is actually discouraged.
How do we deal with that with the aid programme?
Myles Wickstead:
I'm sure Andrew will say something about this as well. You can
only do a certain amount if you're dealing with a government where
the cultural or other norms have not yet—we would say—developed
to a degree where gender equality, getting girls into primary
education, is seen as having equal priority to boys. These are
all things that take time and historical development. I'm very
confident that it's moving in the right direction and that, as
families and countries become economically better off, they will
see increasingly the value of getting girls into school, for example,
and that gender equality follows. I see this all over Africa,
and all over the world really. .
Andrew Shepherd:
I absolutely agree with what Myles said. There is a sense in which—this
goes back to whether the MDGs address the underlying causes—gender
equality is often seen as an underlying cause of poverty and deprivation
of women, and women's status in society. These are the difficult
issues that you were talking about. If you look for evidence,
in terms of what can be done on these underlying issues, there
is also a lot that can be done and many developing countries are
doing these sorts of things and DFID, generally speaking, supports
them. It is not always done by Government; it may be done by
civil society organisations or the private sector in terms of
employment and so on. We've just done another report called Stemming
girls' chronic poverty in which we tried to assemble a mass
of good examples of what can be done in this very difficult area.
So my message would be that it's a difficult area, it's culturally
sensitive and so on, but there is a lot going on, there is a lot
that can be done, and there is a lot that an organisation like
DFID can do.
Q69 Chris White:
Going on to reaching the vulnerable and ensuring equality, it's
clear that, in the rush towards achieving the development goals,
some of the vulnerable have been left behind. I would be interested
to know what your view on that is, and on whether donors and countries
have just been looking at picking off some of the easier fruit
first?
Andrew Shepherd:
The big change in the set of orthodox mainstream development policies
between 2000 and 2010 is the advent of social protection on the
scene. Social protection is not a panacea. It doesn't deal with
everything, it's not a magic bullet, so it will help kids into
school and through school, but the schools need to be in place,
they need to be good quality schools. You can't solve all problems
with one measure. The big change is that vulnerability has been
recognised both by many governments, developing country governments,
and by the international community as an important component of
the poverty problem. There is a response, or set of responses.
there, that are on the table. So, I think we're in a much better
position.
We have a lot of evidence about how those responses
work in practice. We're in a much better position in 2010 than
we were in 2000 on that vulnerability issue. What we need is
a bigger, more concerted push behind that evidence to generate
action, particularly in low-income countries, where governments
struggle with the issues like, "Do we have the budgets to
make the long-term commitments to fund these programmes over five
years, 10 years, 15 years?" There are things that
DFID and other development agencies can do to support those long-term
budget processes.
However, the major vulnerability that poor people
face is ill health. We've been talking about measures that largely
look at preventing ill health or put in place very basic health
systems to help people deal with malaria and respiratory diseases
and so on. What sets people back in their attempts to escape
poverty is the ill health of a breadwinner, somebody who has to
go and get work but cannot get work because of either recurrent
or acute ill health, often over long periods of time. The mechanisms
to deal with ill health in those sorts of situations are often
not there. The health services are often not there, so, yes,
build up the health services certainly. Health insurance is almost
non-existent for most people in developing countries, let alone
poor people, but we know, from small-scale experiments at least
that health insurance can work, can be relatively inclusive, and
there are some larger scale experiences on that too. It is not
just a matter of maternal and child health. Dealing with ill health
across the board is something that has to be recognised. The
cost of medicines, the whole issue of patenting of medicines,
and the constraints that countries face in producing generic medicines
or buying generic medicines is another issue.
Q70 Chris White:
You've come up with some solutions, but in talking about the most
vulnerable, with the solution of health insurance, there seems
to be a big gap between those two. Do you think we should be
changing our emphasis towards how aid is put to the more vulnerable
in our societies?
Andrew Shepherd:
Thinking about the UK, DFID has gone quite a long way where there
has been space for it to do so in countries; Bangladesh would
be a good example of where it has shifted its programme very much
in the direction of focusing on the poorest and the most vulnerable
in Bangladesh. I would that that could happen more widely. I
will just very briefly mention one international agency that has
adopted an equity focus for its entire programme recently—that
is UNICEF, under its new chief executive, Anthony Lake. Take
a look at what UNICEF is doing because I think it's a model.
Q71 Chris White:
You used the words "space" and "programme"
in your answer. I had the fortune or otherwise of being interviewed
by Rod Liddle for The Sunday Times, and the question
was, how can you contrast a space programme against the poorest
people in India. Sorry, but again it is coming back to how you
identify people in India that need that support, need that aid,
while at the same time we're watching videos of space shuttles
and things. That's really the issue that I'm trying to get to
the crux of.
Andrew Shepherd:
India is a very good example. It's very clear who the poorest
are in India. They're largely in something like six of the biggest
and poorest states of India. They are often from the bottom of
the caste system or the Scheduled Tribes. The Scheduled Tribes
are the poorest people in India and I think that's about 85 million.
It is pretty clear who the poorest are. What is not absolutely
clear is how to bring them into the mainstream. The Government
of India has initiated over the last five years what you would
have to call a rights-based approach to development, starting
with the right to information, the right to employment, the right
to education. This is, I suppose, allowing people to claim the
rights that, in a sense, they've had all along, but just making
it more specific—giving them a few more tools to do that—and
I think creating a lot of energy in society to make sure that
those vulnerable people at the bottom of the heap are included.
Now, a rights-based approach, and again thinking
about the post-2015 agenda, is not a magic bullet because you
still need to have the services supplied; you still must have
the mechanisms which make those services accountable to people;
you still must have demand for those services. The Scheduled
Tribe family is unlikely to have a very high demand for education
because they all have to go out and earn their daily bread. If
there is a right to employment, and if that right to employment
is effected by a Government that provides people with a backup
employment scheme if there is no employment in the market, which
is often the case, that's going to help with the kids going to
school and staying in school and eventually with the long-term
progress of those households. So putting rights in place, putting
mechanisms for people in place to claim those rights, and making
sure that the services to back those rights are available are
all very much part of that picture.
Q72 Chair:
Can I bring in Richard Burden? We had a very lively discussion,
Myles was there, when we had our informal briefing about the fact
that more and more poor people are in middle-income countries
and I think that's something that we want to explore a bit a more.
Q73 Richard Burden:
There are three areas on the question of equity that I'd like
your comments on. First of all, around this issue of middle-income
countries; the second will be around how far it is legitimate
to and how far we can influence in-country thinking; and the third
is about DFID's role. On the first of those, Malcolm made the
point that the estimate is that three-quarters of people live
in middle-income countries and yet the focus, and if you look
at the MDGs, up to MDG 8 everything talks about people—it
doesn't talk about countries. When it gets to MDG 8 it starts
to talk about countries. Do you think the summit did address
the fact that you can't easily cut reducing poverty in all its
definitions by defining it in terms of countries and, if not,
should the summit have done a bit more about addressing poverty
in middle-income countries and, if so, how?
Myles Wickstead:
Shall I have a first cut at that? I'm not sure that the summit
did really get to grips with those difficult issues that you've
identified, and I think perhaps that DFID's role is different,
depending on what sort of country we're talking about. In the
poorest countries, I think DFID's role is essentially about supporting
government, about helping create economic growth, which is the
necessary, if not sufficient, precondition to development. What
our Commission for Africa report last month showed was that Africa
made significant progress in economic growth over the last five
or 10 years, but that the benefits of that had not yet been
sufficiently doled out to people at grass-roots level, the very
poorest people.
Probably in middle-income countries you need to take
a slightly different approach, which is not about creating economic
growth, which is very large in China, particularly, and in India
and other southern and eastern Asian countries. What you need
probably is a much more targeted approach on the very poorest
people in those middle-income countries. Of course, there is
a very strongly decentralised system in India, so it's not about
central government but working probably with the governments of
the regions, the poorest regions, that Andrew mentioned, in developing
policies and also helping with financial resources to create the
social protection schemes, the basic health and education services,
that can help bring those very poorest people out of poverty.
A different kind of policy input is needed. Of course, fragile
states as well; some people are nervous about this whole notion
of fragile states and DFID putting more resources into fragile
states. Actually, we do need to be engaged in those states because
they are full of very poor people and while you have that bad
governance they're not going to get any sort of development, so
we really have to address these and use different instruments
in the different countries and different circumstances. I think
DFID is quite good at doing that.
Q74 Richard Burden:
Just going back to the international scene and the summit—perhaps
we can return to DFID in a minute—do you think that there
should have been a new indicator put on that tackles the issue
of equity and narrowing the gap between rich and poor? Should
that be a central objective internationally, rather than a kind
of implication that hangs around in the background?
Myles Wickstead:
Andrew knows more about this than I do. I think that that is
quite a difficult policy discussion to get into. Take this country
for example: we talk about having full primary education; actually,
it's probably about 95% isn't it? You always have that 5% who
exclude themselves because they play truant. In the discussion
about reaching the most vulnerable, the difficult-to-reach groups
at the end of it are always going to be more and more difficult.
I think that we do need to take seriously this issue of pockets
of poverty in countries that are very well off. We talk about
India a lot. Brazil, we know, has the highest Gini coefficient
in the world: the difference between the top 10% and the bottom
10%. I think we do have a role, which may not be a financial
role but more of a policy role, in helping to address these constraints.
It's certainly something that we should be looking at in the
post-2015 MDG substitute, whatever that is going to be.
Andrew Shepherd: Can
I just say one or two things on equity in middle-income countries?
We've done some work at ODI which looks at progress that countries
have made and compares progress as it's measured for the MDGs
with a measure of equitable progress. You can at least do that
now that that the data are available to do that for the health
indicators. You do see some quite interesting differences when
you compare across countries, so, if you brought equity into the
indicators, you would see some differences. From a technical
point of view, it can be done, and it would be great if it could
be done. I agree with Myles that it's a very sensitive topic
for member states in a UN context because they feel that it is
a degree of interference in their internal affairs too far. So,
I suppose the discussion is often around proxies for equity.
In middle-income countries, they have the capacity
to deal with the problems they face in general. Brazil has been
making progress in reducing its inequality over the last 10 years.
It is a fairly outstanding example of where that has happened.
It has happened because of good social policies, very largely,
and very substantial investment in social services, but also as
a result of a more employment-intensive economy. It's a highly
political issue. Your other question was how external actors
influence these difficult political discussions. It's quite hard
for an agency like DFID to do that in a very direct way, but perhaps
it can do that indirectly through supporting research and by supporting
civil society actors in those countries, which it does a lot of:
there are social movements behind many of these progressive causes
such as women's movements, and movements of the lower castes and
tribes in India, that are very active and, in some cases, well
organised. I think particularly in contexts like India and Brazil,
you have governments at least part of which are well capable of
taking on board the results of research and making use of them
in policies. So there is a move towards evidence-based policy
making. I think the longterm support for research—as
a researcher, I would say this wouldn't I?—in developing
countries that DFID has been providing over the last 10 years
can be really useful in addressing some of these issues.
Q75 Richard Burden:
My last question just follows that. DFID to some extent is doing
a lot of these things and you've acknowledged that, but is there
more DFID could do on that area of promoting equity? Whether
directly or indirectly, are there any areas you say, "We're
doing well on that" or "We could do a bit more of that
same thing" or "We could do something slightly different"?
Andrew Shepherd:
I certainly think that there is more to be done in the area of
reducing vulnerability. With climate change at the back of everybody's
mind, and certainly in developing countries, African countries
and South Asia are beginning to get their act together on climate
change. Why? Because it's a threat. Climate change is a coming
issue, or an issue that is already there, that is going to give
a greater emphasis to vulnerability and building resilience.
I think there is more to be done on that side. This is the area
that I would really pick out. If you're talking about inequality
and inequity, you're talking principally about bringing the people
who are 75% of the poverty line, who are hungry an awful lot of
the time, up nearer the poverty line. You're providing a springboard
for them to begin to make progress. If you're going to do that
you have to address vulnerability in a very, very serious way,
in agricultural policy for example. Ministries of Agriculture
don't tend to think about risk and vulnerability very much; they
need to. So, it's not just social protection, it's across the
whole board.
Q76 Mr Clappison:
You've said quite a bit about social protection, which I found
very interesting, about how to help people who are scrambling
out of poverty from falling back into it. Can you boil that down
to some policy ideas as to how we could promote that through our
own aid policy?
Andrew Shepherd:
DFID already is, and has been promoting it for a number of years.
It has been supporting quite a large number of what you might
call pilot schemes or experimental work across Africa, particularly
in low-income countries where governments have been quite reluctant,
for understandable reasons, to push too far too fast on this.
DFID has both been talking to governments about the value of
social protection and providing the resources with which to make
experiments and has been willing to provide the large-scale resources
over significant periods of time to get a programme up and running;
sometimes that has been enough to convince a government to take
that risk and develop a national programme. In many countries,
we're still at a stage where these experiments are a little bit
embryonic; they're being evaluated, people are thinking about
them, there is discussion about them in the media and in parliament,
and so on. The issue for the coming years is taking it to the
next stage, learning the results of that experimentation and beginning
to develop national strategies policies and programmes in whatever
form.
Q77 Mr Clappison:
You felt there wasn't enough emphasis on this at the summit?
Andrew Shepherd:
You are right. I think there wasn't enough emphasis. This is
something that is known, it could be done, and it could greatly
improve performance against these targets by 2015. It's not something
that has to wait for the post-2015 discussion; it can be done
now.
Q78 Mr Clappison:
Very much as a lay MP asking you as experts, may I go back to
the question that Mr White put to you on the political context
in which we're operating, particularly with the economic changes
that we're going through and the pressures on public expenditure?
I find as an MP that it's not that difficult to make the case
for international aid where a humanitarian disaster is in progress
or with a very poor country that is well below the standards of
healthcare and education that we enjoy in this country. For middle-income
countries, which Mr White was asking you about, that are clearly
moving ahead economically and choosing to spend their resources
in particular ways, how would you make the case for helping poor
people in those countries to a member of the public who says,
"Look at India and the way it's spending its money, or look
at China and the money it's spending on acquiring natural resources
in Africa itself and its growing economic strength."? How
would you justify to the man on the street spending money on international
aid in countries like that and others?
Myles Wickstead:
I think it's about global equity. That's the argument that one
comes back to in the end. We live in a complex world, where a
country like India has its own space programme and its own development
programme, and is getting money into poor countries. Its influence
in Africa is huge, as of course is China's, which you mentioned,
in different ways. China is interested in Africa's natural resources
and helped to sustain Africa's economic growth in that difficult
period 2007-08 because it continued to buy in its natural resources.
India is much more an exporter of information technology and communications
skills; a huge amount of technical expertise from India is going
into Africa. Its a very complex world and all sorts of different
countries have all sorts of different relationships and you can't
boil it down to a very simple north-south, south-south, east-west—it's
a much more complex world that we live in post-1990.
Ultimately, what you need to say to your constituents
is, "Look, the world is changing; it's becoming a better,
a more equitable place. It took us hundreds of years in our country
to get to a stage where we have greater equality, where children
have the opportunity of getting into school, getting an education,
and making choices about the way they live their lives. We have
a real opportunity to boil down that process to a few decades.
If we put in resources and help now into these very poor areas
in middle-income countries or into fragile states, we have a real
opportunity first, to help those people directly; second, to create
a more secure and stable world, which is in all our interests;
third, to discourage refugee flows and whatever because people's
states are becoming unsustainable because climate change is influencing
those countries in ways that will make living there unsustainable
and create refugee problems. It's a globalised society and it's
therefore really important to address those issues. Actually,
it saves us money in the end; it means that we don't have to do
these military interventions or whatever; it means that we can,
through exercising our soft power and our moral leadership in
the sort of way I think we would all recognise was important,
we do ourselves good, we do good, and we can really help to achieve
a good outcome for the planet."
Q79 Mr Brown:
Mr Shepherd, you said in respect of MDG 7, and I am sorry if I'm
quoting your words back to you that when dealing with the environment,
the whole issue needs to be updated and re-thought. Climate change
is a further challenge here. This question is to both of you:
how can a post-2015 framework help integrate poverty and climate
concerns so that developing nations can harness the benefits from
international efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change?
Andrew Shepherd:
I think I said that MDG 7 was a bit of mess in the sense that
it was an odd collection of targets that had somehow been clubbed
together. It's fairly obvious to me that, with the kind of global
negotiations that are going on around climate change, we need
to begin to rethink some of the ways we address poverty and deprivation.
Some countries are beginning to recognise that; there has been
a thrust in a number of countries towards very serious approaches
towards sustainable development. What we need to do in relation
to MDG 7, or in relation to bringing together the MDGs framework
post-2015 with whatever is negotiated internationally on climate
change, is to look at how these things mesh together. I don't
have ready-made answers on that, partly because there are two
communities pursuing these two issues, and they don't interact
very much. There is a need for a process, and an organisation
like DFID can be quite important in bringing those discourses
together, and a need for time to work out the implications of
reducing poverty in ways that are also environmentally sustainable.
I don't think there is any problem with everybody
agreeing with that, but the question is, how can that be done.
I will just give you a couple of examples. At the moment, there
is a lot of talk about agriculture and food security, as there
was at the MDG summit, and there have been a number of initiatives—the
commitments made at L'Aquila and so on. So, it's a high-profile
issue, but if you look at what's happening as a result of that
high profile on the ground, it's often a matter of getting fertilisers
to farmers. Now, if you take a sustainable agriculture approach,
you would be looking at a much wider range of interventions; fertilisers
might well play a part in that, and are not to be ruled out by
any means, but probably a lesser part than they play in the current
quick-fix strategies that are being pursued on agriculture. That's
one way in which adjustments would be needed. Neither of these
things feature in MDGs in the current targets or indicators framework,
particularly.
There is another set of very important issues around
energy. We have a fantastic range of decentralised green technologies
available in energy, but are we getting the investment behind
those? Are they important in terms of poverty reduction? They're
incredibly important because you need to energise your agriculture;
most poor people are still in agriculture in terms of occupations.
If you're going to move out of agriculture, which poor people
often see as a poverty trap, where are you going to move? You're
going to move into the non-farm economy. Again, it needs energy.
Neither of these two are getting energy from the grid. There
is a process of matching up. There should be something probably
in a post-2015 poverty-reduction framework around energy, which
will link to a climate-change framework.
Myles Wickstead:
Can I just make a very high-level comment on what you say? I
think it really is important, as Andrew says, to bring these two
agendas together and to strengthen the link between poverty and
climate change. What many climate change campaigners will say
is that what is clear now—which wasn't so clear 10 years
ago when the MDGs were put into operation—is that human
creation of climate change is now an undisputed fact. It wasn't
even 10 years ago. It's humanity that has created this momentum
behind climate change. It's essentially a small group of countries
who have created that in the industrialised world: the US, Europe
and Japan. In a sense, their economic growth therefore, has come
about as a result of them using a global good in a way which has
taken that global good away from poorer countries. In other words,
it's been on the back of poor countries that they have been able
to grow their economies to industrialise and to create economic
well-being. The consequences of that in the form of climate change
are being visited on the poorest countries in a way which has
a hugely detrimental effect on their development in terms of global
warming, in terms of sea level rises etc. In a sense there is
a kind of feeling that rich countries owe it to the poorest people
in those poor countries, almost as a form of retribution, which
is a word that I've heard bandied around in these circumstances.
They are looking for retribution or a payment back for the harm
which the developed world has done to the developing world in
creating its own development process.
Chair: Jeremy Lefroy.
We have a couple of quite big questions, but lack the time.
Q80 Jeremy Lefroy:
In the new Commission for Africa report you talk about the average
growth rates of 6% plus across sub-Saharan Africa, and yet at
the same time sub-Saharan Africa is going to miss all the MDGs.
Now, I think you've both hinted at one link between the two which
could be strengthened, which is the tax system. First, are both
those scenarios accurate? Second, how can the MDG framework be
used to drive economic and financial success as well as human
development? Again, I think you've talked about health being
very important and that's clearly a very important input into
economic development, but are there others?
Myles Wickstead:
On your first question, of course Africa started a long way behind
in 2000 in universal primary education and maternal and child
health for example. One of things we did find that I thought
was very interesting and that we reported in our report is Africa
has made progress against every single indicator. It has improved
against every single one of the MDGs, including the maternal health
one—it's only a tiny little blip but it's in the right direction.
On all the other indicators there has been a much more significant
shift in the right direction, not—as you rightly say—fast
enough to get to the MDGs, but making very significant progress
towards them. That should be a cause for celebration, considering
the low point. That is a result of better governance and of better
peace and security. The fact that there are no wars between states
in Africa is one that's widely unreported, I'm afraid.
Jeremy Lefroy: No news is good news then?
Myles Wickstead:
Absolutely. I'm afraid the media still have this idea that Africa
is completely falling apart, is hopeless and full of corruption.
Of course there are elements of all that stuff, but actually
Africa is making huge progress. We quoted, for example, from
the McKinsey report, which says, "If you have money to invest,
invest in Africa." That came out just in the middle of the
year, which was very timely for our work. If a private consultancy
firm is saying that and foreign direct investment is going in
as a result of that, then that's great. That brings me on to
your second point, really. If you get that sort of investment
going into Africa, if you do get companies there creating employment
and creating wealth, then it will have the same effect as China
and India's progress towards the MDGs. You would pull hundreds
of millions of people out of poverty because of that economic
growth. Now what we also say is that you also need more targeted
government interventions to make sure that the poorest people
benefit from that growth as well and more work needs to be done
on that.
Andrew Shepherd:
I agree with you, Myles, that there is a lot of progress around
Africa; particularly if you look at absolute measures rather than
the relative measures, which the MDGs focus on, you'll find that
Africa is often making more progress than countries elsewhere.
If you go to the ODI MDG report scorecard, you will get lots
of evidence on that. However, growth is often not very well distributed.
The results of the benefits of growth are often not very well
distributed—often concentrating on minerals and not enough
on agriculture. Agricultural growth is what is going to give
you your broad-based growth and it's going to help the rural non-farm
economies grow. In addition to minerals, it's services that have
grown and these are urban services. Very often, it is big city
urban services that are growing, as opposed to well-distributed
services around the small towns which will bring benefits to their
hinterlands. So there's something about the pattern of growth
that varies hugely from context to context, but is very important.
Secondly, there's something about the way in which
poor people can participate in growth. You really need to have
a process that gets you away from just being able to offer yourself
as cheap labour. What does that mean? It means that the quality
of your labour needs to be enhanced. Now a question for you:
does primary education, which is the commitment in MDG 2, take
you far enough towards greatly enhancing the quality of your labour
in the labour market? I think the evidence suggests that it isn't.
The international community and many governments are still stuck
on getting everybody into primary school. We have to go beyond
that, and that's one of the areas where I think the world as a
whole desperately needs to begin to move on and to look at post-primary
education. Kids need 10 years of education at least if they're
going to bring their households out of poverty, if the next generation
of that household is going to have a better life. Looking at
education again is something that perhaps we ought to do, in relation
to growth and in relation to people participating in growth.
Q81 Pauline Latham:
I particularly agree with that last comment. With regard to population
growth now, neither the MDG framework nor DFID's policy priorities
explicitly address the issue of population growth. Why does the
international community engage so little with this issue and should
DFID be giving more focus to it?
Myles Wickstead:
I think those are very interesting issues that you've touched
on. What all the historical evidence demonstrates is that you
have a graph that relates economic growth and population. Now
we're at a point on the graph where people in Africa and in many
developing countries are continuing to have very large families,
because traditionally that has been what has kept at least a small
number of children alive even when many have died. We should
welcome this as a time when more and more children are surviving
into adulthood and when adults are living longer and longer.
So we're at a blip, as it were, before the next generation will
take rational decisions. They will realise that actually they
only need a couple of children because they know that those children
are going to survive and go on to primary school—and I completely
agree they then need to go on to secondary school and tertiary
education and into valuable employment.
The population projections that we were looking at
from 10, 20, 30 years ago are not as dramatic as we thought then.
People were talking about 10, 11, even 12 billion people living
in the world. That's come down quite dramatically. We're now
talking about 8.3 billion, I think. A lot of those people are
going to be living in cities: 95% of that additional population
will live in cities and 95% of that additional population in cities
will be living in urban slums. That, I think, is another issue
that we need to be looking at in so far as the MDGs are concerned.
We need to be helping with the population issue, but it is a
function of economic growth and if we stimulate that economic
growth and if the world is becoming a better-off place to live,
then I think we will address that automatically.
Andrew Shepherd:
You are hitting on something that's quite deep here. There are
very difficult cultural, religious and social issues tied up in
this question. It was originally there in the International Development
Targets in the 1990s, it didn't get into the MDGs—it was
in and then it was out and in and out. It's now back in as a
target for universal access to reproductive health services, which
is a fantastic achievement against all the political odds back
in 2006, I think. It's a big achievement, largely for the women's
movement. These issues are connected with the discussion we were
having earlier about gender inequality and women's status. There
are things that can be done and even in quite politically difficult
situations, ministers of health can get together with religious
leaders and have rational discussions on these issues. We can
expect economic growth and general progress to do some of that
work, but there's a lot more that can be done, and sometimes has
been done in quite unpromising circumstances.
Bangladesh is a great example. It is a Muslim country
with a very pro-natalist culture, but the simple provision of
services at the grass-roots level over sustained periods of time
both by NGOs and by government has enabled women and families
to have greater choice about the number of children that they
have. I think if you can find mechanisms to get those reproductive
health services out there, people will make their own decisions
and birth rates will come down among poor households more rapidly
than they would otherwise. There is a fantastic case for public
action there by governments in co-ordination with civil society
and religious leaders and so on.
Q82 Pauline Latham:
Can I just come back on the agricultural side? You talk about
there being so many people living in urban slums. Maybe if we
can make agriculture more attractive and wealth creating, you'll
stop so many people going into the urban situation because they
all think, "It's much better in the cities." It isn't
actually. If we can encourage them to stay in the rural communities
and make money there, we won't have the same problems in the urban
slums as we might do if we don't do something with agriculture.
Myles Wickstead:
I think that's a very good point. However, at the moment 70%
of Africa lives in rural areas. By 2030 that will be 50% and
all the indications are that agricultural labour in developed
economies accounts for somewhere between 2 and 5% of the population,
so people are going to have to be doing other things in those
areas as well as agriculture. Maybe the ICT revolution can really
help with that, but I completely agree with you: the grass is
not greener in the city.
Chair: May I thank both
of you? I think you've given us quite a positive flavour and
perhaps demonstrated that the MDGs are perhaps delivering a little
bit better than people think, and that you feel it has been given
a renewed boost by the summit. You have also engaged us with
James Clappison's question about who you should be helping and
where, and what is the right priority for us, which is something
I think the Committee will clearly want to focus on quite a lot
over the next Parliament I would think. Thank you both very much
indeed for both your written submissions and for coming in. That's
been really helpful and positive.
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